Words Matter

Back when my kids were both in high school, I had a conversation with a certain school administrator, a vice principal, who’d reluctantly taken the meeting with my wife Susan and me. We’d asked for the get-together to talk about a notorious campus bully who’d been targeting one of our kids – and apparently two or three others students – making it an unpleasant and terrifying thing to simply get up and go to school every day.

It had been going on for months, and I’d done all the usual dad things, from having those awful dinner table talks where I talked about “not projecting victimhood” to writing letters informing the school about the bully that was running unchecked on their campus. Finally, I scheduled the meeting to try and put a stop to it once and for all.

I remember the conversation well, especially the end.

The administrator, clearly exhausted from these types of conversations, had listened (mostly) impassively to my recitation of threats and tortures, physical and emotional, the bully-in-question had been doling out daily. Finally, he offered the weary suggestion that perhaps I should consider things from the bully’s perspective, that maybe things weren’t so good for that particular student at home, and that possibly they were simply acting out from a place of unhappiness.

I remember responding, “That may be true, but my kid deserves to feel safe at school.”

“All kids deserve to feel safe at school,” the guy replied.

And that was the end of it.

While there is no denying the obvious truth of his statement, that all children deserve to feel safe when they step onto a school campus, it was just as clear that this man was not planning to do anything much about protecting my kid. That despite his uttering a pronouncement which seemed to include an understanding of my child’s need for protection and respect, there was no doubt he was saying it, “All kids,” as a clear dismissal of my particular kid’s own situation.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately.

When someone says “All lives matter” as a counter to “Black lives matter,” they might as well say, “Black lives don’t matter,” because that’s almost always what it seems to mean – and let’s face it, most of the time that’s exactly what people do mean. And even if some folks do genuinely intend to suggest that all human lives have equal value, and are deserving of equal treatment across the board, the use of the phrase “All lives matter” sounds every bit as dismissive and off-topic as that vice principal sounded when he told me that my kid’s safety was not his priority. I say this with full awareness of the privileges and racial advantages that even allowed us to be having that conversation in a community and school district where school administrators are willing (even reluctantly), and have the time, to take a meeting at all.

Frankly, I’ve never quite understood why the phrase “Black lives matter” is taken by so many to be so deserving of such a quick, verbally defensive retort. After all, if I truly believe that all desserts are delicious, why would I find it objectionable for someone to say Wicked Slushes are delicious? Why would I feel the need to meet such a statement with any response at all?

It’s because all desserts are delicious that the deliciousness of Wicked Slushes is incontestable.

Words, though, are malleable things. They are not concrete, and our brains often mold then to match our expectations, our beliefs and in many cases, our biases. Still, how did we reach such a place where so many people are arguing about the meaning of the word “matters”?

A couple of decades ago, the National Endowment for the Arts launched a campaign intended to highlight the lack of attention that poetry was receiving in public education and the country’s literary heart in general. The slogan that was eventually employed, and which became the name of the whole campaign, was “Poetry Matters.”

To my recollection, there were no counter campaigns suggesting that, to the contrary, “All Literature Matters.” No one I heard of lobbied the media to say, “What about novels? Don’t they matter? What about picture books, romantic fiction, television shows, stage plays, Madlibs? Don’t they matter, too?”

No one said that, because it was universally understood that “Poetry Matters” was never suggesting that only poetry mattered, or that it mattered more than any other form of literature. What the slogan clearly meant, and was understood to mean by pretty much everyone, was that the educational system was operating as if poetry, amongst all the types of literature in existence, did not matter as much as other disciplines, and that perhaps it was deserving of equal treatment.

Hardly controversial.

There have been countless campaigns across the years that have used “matters” as a slogan. “Safety Matters.” “Punctuality Matters.” “Good Grammar Matters.” “Dressing well matters.” “A good night’s sleep matters.” And in every case, though clearly less fraught than what’s happening lately, everyone understood the word “matters” to mean “also matters.” It means “Pay attention, because here’s something important that you’ve been ignoring.”

In the movie “Network,” just before Howard Beale says “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore,” he tells his viewers, “You’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a human being, godd—n it! My life has value!”

“My life has value.”

Again, not a very controversial statement.

Because life does have value.

As does poetry.

As does a bullied child simply wanting to walk through a gymnasium locker room without being beaten to a pulp by another child who may or may not have problems at home.

And if the word “All” really does include “Black,” and brown and Native American and Chinese American and blue-uniformed and lesbian and gay and transgender and elderly and poor and disabled and possessed of a love for literature of all kinds, then perhaps those who love to say “All” so often should actually be working to make that a reality, instead of loudly standing in the way of it.

(Culture Junkie runs every other week in the Argus-Courier.)